Dirty tricks

June 15 2002

Did the "dirty bomber" really pose the threat that politicians wanted Americans to believe? Questions are being asked, Paul McGeough writes.

Dirty bomber or dirty politics? For weeks the terror diet in the US has included hefty serves of name-calling and finger-pointing, as the CIA and the FBI tried to duck the blame for the litany of intelligence failures that preceded the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Worried that the war on terror was becoming a civil war, with a flood of leaks and counter-leaks leaving Americans preoccupied more with the ability of the nation to protect itself than with terrorism itself, the White House weighed in abruptly last week with a plan it had resisted for months.

The CIA and the FBI would be joined in battle by a super new department of homeland security which would bring together under one umbrella more than 20 federal agencies - with their combined staffs of 170,000 and budget of $70 billion - which were overseen by 88 congressional committees and subcommittees.

But the plan served only to light a new fire under the debate - what difference would it make? Who would run it? Could the FBI and the CIA be made to co-operate with it? Would it get through the Congress unscathed and would it be in place by September 11 this year?

It was not the circuit-breaker the Administration wanted - questions on the ability of the US to defend itself remained on page one. And they stayed there until this dramatic announcement by the Attorney-General, John Ashcroft, in a special TV hook-up from Moscow on Monday: "We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or a dirty bomb, in the US."");document.write("

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Politics gave way to fear. And as Ashcroft warned of "mass death and injury", he kicked off an intense examination of the ease with which a dirty bomb might be assembled - by combining readily available radioactive industrial devices with conventional explosives - and the likelihood of contamination causing whole city blocks in downtown New York or Washington to be abandoned.

The Attorney-General had a star exhibit - prisoner Abdullah al Muhajir, who is an American citizen. But the timing and manner of the announcement sparked a new wave of accusations in Congress and in the media that this was an attempt by Ashcroft to use fear to ensure swift congressional endorsement for the proposed department of homeland security and to take the heat off the CIA and the FBI.

Al Muhajir had been in US custody for a full month, so why the attention-seeking hook-up to Moscow where Ashcroft was on unrelated business?

How could he declare from Moscow that the US had "disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive dirty bomb" and on Wednesday have the Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, play it all down with this: "I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk."

By midweek the "bomber" had become a "scout" and his Internet "research" on dirty bombs became as "he surfed the Net".

Then USA Today reported that the White House had reprimanded Ashcroft for exaggerating the extent of a threat that, in fact, was minimal.

Al Muhajir was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare Airport when he arrived from Pakistan on May 8.

The authorities say that he was in Afghanistan in November and December of last year and that he had proposed a dirty bomb attack to Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda's specialist in foreign recruitment, who so far is the most senior of Osama bin Laden's associates to be captured by the US.

Apparently, al-Qaeda sent al Muhajir back to the US to check possible targets - but the FBI was awake to him. He had been under surveillance for weeks and on the last leg of his flight, from Zurich to Chicago, six FBI agents and as many of their Swiss colleagues clustered around the unsuspecting al Muhajir.

But questions also are being asked about the evidence against al Muhajir because, first, he was being held as a "material witness" and then he was declared by the President, George Bush, to be an "enemy combatant", which allowed him to be handed over to the military for indefinite detention.

And at the same time the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, set out the Administration's priorities for reporters: "We are not interested in trying him at the moment, or punishing him at the moment. We are interested in finding out what he knows." But if al Muhajir was intent on attacking the US, why use this back-pedalling language?

After senators were briefed on the case against al Muhajir, the Los Angeles Times was told: "Not many people were satisfied that we had a whole hell of a lot."

The Administration claims there is legal precedent for its handling of al Muhajir, but legal commentator Ian Weinstein of Fordham University said: "What they want to do is hold him incommunicado, break him down and get information. It would be a reasonable thing to do - except that it's illegal."

The US authorities have spent much of the week giving themselves big pats on the back. But it is not unreasonable to ask whether the arrest was good detective work by the authorities or sloppy terrorism by al-Qaeda. As an Administration insider told The New York Times: "He left an amazing number of tracks around."

Al Muhajir was dumb enough to draw attention to himself with an irregularity in his travel documents when he attempted to leave Pakistan in early April and then he shone a klieg light on himself by going to the US consulate and applying for a new passport.

Quick thinking by a consular officer who suspected him of identity theft prompted an examination of his criminal record and questions about what he might be up to in Pakistan. The upshot was that his picture was included in a rogues' gallery being shown to Zubaydah and other al-Qaeda captives who were teasing their interrogators with tales that one of their own, an unnamed US citizen, wanted to plant a dirty bomb.

Thirty-one-year-old al Muhajir was born Jose Padilla, a Roman Catholic of Puerto Rican descent. As a child his chubby face earned him the nickname "Pucho". He was born in Brooklyn, his father died when Jose was young and after his family moved to Chicago, he became involved in street gangs.

He was put in detention at 13 for his part in a murder; he became involved in a brawl when he was caught trying to steal a doughnut; later he was jailed again for a road-rage incident in which he fired a gun at another car from six metres away - and missed. His criminal record says thief and bully.

In prison for the road-rage attack in Florida in the early 1990s, he converted to Islam - apparently one of the few Hispanics to do so in US prisons. On his release he legally changed his name (as opposed to the seven aliases he had used over the years) and married an Egyptian.

They moved to Egypt for two years but al Muhajir is said to have gone on to Pakistan after deciding that the extremist mosques of Cairo were not extreme enough for him.

Given his propensity for erratic and violent behaviour and the clumsiness of having to apply for a new passport in the middle of an operation, it is hard to see what al-Qaeda saw in al Muhajir, apart from the fact that he had documentary gold - a US passport - and was prepared to put it into the service of al-Qaeda.

None of this is to underplay the risk of a dirty bomb strike against the US or to present al Muhajir as an innocent.

For many - in the intelligence, military, political and general communities - more strikes within the US are inevitable. And for terrorists, a dirty bomb is cheap and effective.

And while some experts said in the debate this week that death and post-attack cancer rates in the event of a dirty bomb attack would be very low, other reports focused on the alarming advice given to a Senate committee by Henry Kelly, a physicist who heads the Federation of American Scientists.

Using as an example a radioactive industrial gauge which went missing in March and later was found at a scrap metal plant in North Carolina, he said that it contained sufficient caesium to contaminate "a swathe about one mile long, covering 40 city blocks".

Speculating on the ability of a terrorist to mill the caesium into finer particles and combine it with about five kilograms of TNT, he went on: "If the device was detonated at the National Gallery of Art, the Capitol, Supreme Court and the Library of Congress would exceed EPA contamination limits and would have to be abandoned for decades."

There are about 2 million industrial, medical and research installations in the US that are licensed to have radioactive devices. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, about 300 of these devices go missing each year.

The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, snapped at reporters whose questions suggested that the Administration was using the dirty bomber story to pile on pressure to get its latest anti-terrorism plans nailed down, saying they could come only from "the most cynical among the most partisan".

But for all that, some Washington observers argue that the Administration has succeeded in refocusing the debate on this year's threats, rather than last year's failures.

The dirty bomber arrest prompted an editorial in The Wall Street Journal saying that it had "lifted nuclear terrorism out of Tom Clancy novels and into a clear and present danger".

Given how the story has unfolded this week, it could be argued that Clancy needs to lift his game if he is going to produce storylines like this.